José Baselga, pioneer in breast cancer treatment
José Baselga, a Spanish oncologist who married clinical practice and laboratory research, helping develop Herceptin and other drugs that have been credited with extending or saving the lives of millions of women with breast cancer, died March 21 at his home in the Cerdanya region of Spain. He was 61.
The cause was sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare degenerative disorder of the brain, according to his family. Baselga also maintained a residence in New York City.
A son and grandson of physicians, Baselga devoted his professional life to improving breast cancer treatment through the pursuit of novel therapies, the provision of care custom-designed for a patient’s individual needs and the cultivation of younger oncologists who would carry that work forward.
“He once showed me a snapshot of himself as a young man in Spain in a corrida with a bull,” one of his patients, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, wrote in an email. “He was just in streetclothes. He said to me, that bull, that is cancer, I am going to defeat it.”
Baselga’s clinical research centered on the development of drugs targeted to specific genetic mutations and the molecular biology of particular tumors, a burgeoning field of research that advanced cancer treatment beyond the more generalized forms of chemotherapy that were once the standard of care. His work on drugs such as Herceptin, Perjeta and everolimus made him one of the “most important clinical researchers in the world,” Javier Cortes, a longtime collaborator and director of the International Breast Cancer Center in Barcelona, said in an interview.
Baselga held numerous appointments over his career that placed him at the forefront of international cancer research. At Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in his native Barcelona, he founded what is now one of the major oncology institutes of Europe. He then served for two years as chief of hematology oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before being appointed chief medical officer and physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in 2012.
Baselga resigned from Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2018 after the New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization, published a report alleging that he had failed to properly disclose his financial ties to drug and health-care companies whose research he addressed in academic articles. The next year, he joined the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca as chief of research and development in oncology.
Hope Rugo, director of breast oncology and clinical trials education at the cancer center of the University of California at San Francisco, described Baselga in an interview as a “translational oncologist” who labored to apply the most promising laboratory findings to the clinic.
He was perhaps best known for his participation in the development of Herceptin, a drug used to treat patients with an aggressive form of breast cancer in which tumors display an abnormally high level of the growth-promoting protein HER2.